The Frick of the West Side

In Australia, the looming arrival was a front-page sensation. In New York, it merited a one-inch column on page fifty-three, next to an ad for National Lampoon: Lemmings. The Times described ‘a small, private bonvoyage’ party on the previous evening, 1 October 1973, with ‘no formal ceremonial flourish’.

Host Ben Heller, a wealthy businessman and art collector, hadn’t really been in the mood for a party. The next day’s goodbye would be fraught.

After Heller’s wife, Pat, had proposed the party, the couple started making a list of people they felt should ‘drop in in the course of an evening’. They stopped when they hit 150 and changed their minds on how to mark the occasion.

‘I thought it was out of taste, just too much,’ Ben Heller said. ‘So we decided on a small sit-down dinner for a few of our intimate friends – painter friends, critic friends, dealer friends, friend-friends.’ Pat Heller wanted to bring together the people who had been with her husband from the very beginning of his career as a collector. Invitations were hastily issued by phone. She summoned their big mixed family and convinced a famous New York cake maker to try his hand at an edible version of the abstract-expressionist masterpiece.

On the night, a 1928 Burgundy was poured. The meal was smoked salmon, veal, cheese and fruit, with chocolate mousse for dessert.

Legendary New York gallery owner Betty Parsons was at one of the three tables, among the two dozen others who made the final cut. Porter McCray came too: he was the renowned arts administrator who, through a chance lunchtime conversation at the Museum of Modern Art, had helped bring the guest of honour into the Heller home some eight years earlier. BH Friedman, the critic and biographer, had offered his counsel on Australia’s acquisition. Friedman was accompanied by his wife, Abby. The couple had been to the Hellers’ apartment many times before.

This place had a reputation.

Mark Rothko had called the Hellers’ tenth-floor home ‘the Frick of the West Side’. Alongside the Hellers and their children residing at the apartment at 151 Central Park West lived a remarkable private collection of modern and abstract-expressionist art, including works by Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Alberto Giacometti, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and many of the New York school. A Franz Kline in the hallway; a Jasper Johns in the dining room. The now-dispersed collection would be worth hundreds of millions today.

In the context of such abundance, one might wonder if the removal of a single painting would even be noticed, let alone because for the kind of anguish that would see Pat discovering her husband crying in front of the canvas late at night, on multiple occasions, in the weeks before the party.

But for Ben, this was something monumental. This night would be his last with Blue poles, the final masterpiece of his late friend Jackson Pollock.

Pollock considered Heller his closest friend in the years before his death. They met at least once a week, drinking together after Pollock’s session with a Manhattan therapist. Heller would often visit Pollock and his wife, the artist Lee Krasner, at their home near East Hampton. Pollock’s death in a drunken car accident in 1956 wasn’t the only pain Heller carried throughout his life, but breaking up his collection had taken a toll.

Heller had, quite literally, reshaped his life to accommodate his friend’s art. Due to the size of Pollock’s 1952 work – more than two metres high and nearly five metres long – he had had the layout of the family’s apartment changed, removing a wall between two rooms and replacing it with a slate-grey wooden partition on which to hang Blue poles. The expat Australian critic Robert Hughes called it the most expensive room divider in history.

Shortly after seeing Blue poles in Australia for the first time, Pat Heller said, ‘He had lived with the painting for so much of his life and the two other huge Pollock paintings were gone, so this was the last baby to leave home.’

Even with the storm of headlines and criticism as the news of the purchase became public, the Hellers could hardly have imagined the controversy and decades of cultural debate that lay ahead.

Heller’s sale of the massive canvas caused anger and excitement in the United States and in Australia, the artwork’s new home. One country railed against its loss; the other was polarised by its arrival.

Long a collector ahead of the art world’s trends, Heller had been convinced to sell to the collection of the fledgling Australian National Gallery, renamed in the 1990s to become the National Gallery of Australia. He’d been promised that a small revolution was underway in a country he’d never visited. No Australian child, said the government of Gough Whitlam, would finish school without travelling to Canberra to stand in front of the painting at least once.

The government also agreed to a significant increase on the original price: the painting sold for US$2 million, the highest price then paid for an American work of art.

No-one at the party that night knew Blue poles would become a touchstone for an entire country’s move from adolescence to some kind of cultural maturity.

No-one could know that this much-maligned and misunderstood collection of oil, enamel, aluminium paint and glass, dripped thick and all over its expensive Belgian linen, would later become a minor character in the constitutional crisis that would remove from office a forward-thinking prime minister who had public servants to buy the painting and disclose its extraordinary price.

Like few other cultural objects, Blue poles would become Australian legend.

A couple of weeks before guests arrived for the party, the emeritus director of Yale University’s art gallery, Andrew C Ritchie, was asked how he would react to the news a Pollock had been sold for $2 million. ‘I’d drop dead,’ he said.

Despite the many tears shed, Heller knew he’d done the right thing. ‘It’s impossible to have such glory in one place,’ he said years later. ‘It’s more than you can expect anything to be.’

This text is an extract from Blue Poles: Jackson Pollock, Gough Whitlam and the Painting That Changed a Nation, Hachette Australia.